Tim Maguire's floral passion

By Stephanie Bunburry

May 12, 2007 — 10.00am

IT IS ASTONISHING how one's luck can turn. Twenty-three years ago, Tim Maguire was a young landscape painter on his way from Sydney to art school in Rhode Island with a large cheque from the Australia Council in his pocket.

"And then Keating floated the Australian dollar while I was in the air on my way to Los Angeles," the artist recalls. "When I arrived, I discovered that, during the time it had taken to cross the Pacific, I'd lost thousands of dollars."

There was no point going on. He could no longer afford the American school's fees. Instead Maguire, now 49, ended up at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where the tuition was free but the atmosphere ferociously constrained. He was only accepted thanks to the grace and favour of a Dutch professor who insisted that, before he lifted a brush, Maguire should travel around Europe's galleries for at least six months to gain some idea of what art should look like.

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"I didn't particularly want to be there," Maguire says now. "And in no sense did the Kunstakademie want me either. But I was really lucky at the same time."

The legacy of that first grand tour is all around us in Maguire's London studio: vast canvases, some of which take up entire walls, showing magnified details of flowers, cacti and winter branches. These light and luminous natural abstractions have made Maguire one of the art market's great success stories. "When I started working with this floral imagery," he says, "they were based on Dutch still-life painting from the 17th century." He would choose a detail - perhaps a small square of petals from a still life of flowers on a table - and rework that tiny scrap as a large canvas, blown up to the point of abstraction.

It sounds precious, even academic, but the effect is bold, lush and intensely physical. And, paradoxically, very Australian. "One reason I was drawn to that, I think, was because of a sensitivity to issues of cultural dislocation you might experience as an artist who has grown up and been educated in Australia and then goes to Europe and sees, for the first time, those paintings you had known only in reproduction."

At that time, he says, he felt entirely excluded from the contemporary art world. "The local artistic patrimony doesn't apply when you get to Europe," he says. "You are a fish out of water and you have to try to link up, not only your personal world, but your cultural world with this other cultural world you are now moving through."

The story of Australian art was largely about the struggle to use European artistic strategies within the local context, a battle of zero interest to Europeans themselves. He felt, he says, as if his tongue had been ripped out. "Not only could I not speak the language, but none of my ideas seemed to connect with anything."

Back in Australia, meanwhile, there was a tug-of-war going on between a hard core of formalists, who talked about painting as mark-making, and the painters keen to overthrow the traces of abstract expressionism in favour of imagery. "I suppose I was between those two things," he says, "trying to find some sort of third way where the way you made things and what you made were intrinsically bound."

Maguire always knew he wanted a career outside the confined world of Australian art. In the early '90s he went to London and was gradually establishing himself when the gallery handling his work went out of business. It was, he thought, simply too difficult to begin again, so he and his family returned to Australia, the artist resigned to pursuing a local career.

Then in 1993 he won the prestigious Moet et Chandon scholarship, which allowed him to work in France under a premier cru name. It changed everything, he says. He worked, exhibited and made contacts; he wasn't going to be excluded again. After a decade in France, he is once again based in London.

Maguire was hardly the first visitor to the Louvre or the Prado to be struck by how different it felt to look, at last, at the real thing. But the experience led him to reflect on that peculiarly Australian experience of learning a culture second-hand. "These paintings, where I would take little details from Dutch paintings and reconfigure them, were as much to do with the idea of the source and how that gets broken down, how they are changed by reproduction and by their story being told and retold, in a sort of game of Chinese whispers."

In fact, he reasoned, images had been handed on, in one way or another, forever. "I was often working from tiny sections which I cropped from a very badly reproduced postcard from a photograph of a painting that had already aged 300 years. And the painting itself is a reproduction of a flower and, probably, based on a series of watercolours by the artist or perhaps the artist's grandfather. So the whole question of reality and reproduction was being questioned by the work."

He has been working with outsize natural forms for almost 15 years - the Dutch masters have now given way to his own photographs of plants, flowers and branches - but Maguire is hardly a nature painter. The giant flowers and fruit make his work immediately recognisable; what distinguishes it is a meticulous painting technique based on the principles of lithographic printing.

First, he uses a computer to break down the image into colour percentages of basic printers' colours: yellow, magenta and cyan. This produces three black-and-white versions, which can seem remarkably similar, of the image to be painted. He then builds the painting one colour at a time, working from those computer-generated templates, using paint thinned to the point of transparency so that the layering creates other colours on the surface, along with light, shade and the illusion of form and depth, just as the mix of inks does in traditional lithographic printing. As each colour is drying, he flicks it with solvent to create points of pure colour like cracks of light in the surface.

More recently, he has been exploring the possibilities of creating even more fluorescent images by making digital prints, where the same three colours are blended from printed dots. They, too, are vast. In catalogue reproductions, they are oddly reminiscent of Seurat's dotted paintings made 130 years ago. "Hallucinogenic pointillism!" Maguire says, laughing. "But there is quite a different quality when you see it."

Partly this is due to their size. This is crucial, the artist says, to both prints and paintings. "If they weren't big, they wouldn't be interesting. You need the scale to make the process visible and my goal is to make the viewer aware of its physical components while, at the same time, accepting the reality config- ured in the picture." He is, he says, probably more interested in the process than the subject, which he chose largely for convenience.

"It was important to have an image to break down. Just to be abstract was too free, really. I wanted the tension between something that was very recognisable and yet could be pulled apart. I wanted some subject matter that would have within it the possibility of attention to detail and yet offer enough freedom to really play around with mark-making and gestures. One thing that is nice about flowers is that you can really yank them around and they still kind of look like flowers."

Maguire doesn't paint only plants. He has painted portraits using the same colour-separation technique; he also paints dense abstracts that, he says ruefully, often don't make it to a gallery wall. But he feels that his work with floral forms is far from exhausted. "I'm surprised, I have to say, that I'm still doing it," he says, "but I try to keep the processes moving and the imagery changing."

And, of course, people love them. Maguire is one of Australia's most successful living artists; his floral paintings sell for substantial prices. He even has star power; Cate Blanchett has written an introduction for his new exhibition catalogue, describing his painting as "unabashedly revelling in its own beauty yet charged with the promise of death and decay" as well as "the beguiling eroticism of a Maguire painting's surface". The elephant lurking in the studio is, surely, the fear of being merely decorative. Of being pleasing.

Absolutely, Maguire agrees, but points out that those original Dutch floral paintings that inspired him were often painted on the backs of portraits as memento mori: a reminder that whatever is alive will one day wither and die. They may be pretty but the stalks are already drooping and the petals shedding. The line between beauty and kitsch is a fine one, Maguire says, but so is the one between the beautiful and the monstrous. The point of the process, perhaps, is to make work that is all those things at once.

Tim Maguire by Tony Godfrey, Jonathan Watkins, Cate Blanchett (Piper Press, $99) is released on May 23.Tim Maguire, new paintings & pigment inks, will run at Martin Browne Fine Art, 57-59 Macleay Street, Potts Point, from May 23 to June 17.